Nick G
The recently re-elected Rann Labor Government in South Australia is on the nose.
Rann, who once enjoyed the highest popularity rating of any state premier at 84%, is now languishing at 38% as workers and community activists continue their fight against the State Budget.
Rann has been dancing for so long to the tune of Business SA and the Property Council of SA that he can no longer get back into step with the people.
Nor is he a simple puppet to big business.
What really makes him stink is his arrogant dismissal of the people and his ardent championing of the big end of town.
Several years ago Rann succeeded in rebadging the ALP as “pro-business, pro-growth and pro-mining” prompting calls in some quarters for a return to Labor values in the ALP.
These well-meaning and understandable sentiments show that the role of social democracy in delivering the workers to the agenda and interests of the capitalist class is still not widely grasped.
There is rejection within this viewpoint of Rann and his deputy and Treasurer Kevin Foley for being anti-union and anti-people but there is also the illusion that they can be replaced by “better” leaders who will reverse the rebadging and “return the Labor Party” to the core values of progressive social democracy.
There are also others who share a growing realization that it is too late for the ALP, that it is finished as a vehicle through which workers and community organizations might have their interests promoted.
This viewpoint realizes that only strong community and people’s action can create opportunities for victory and that the promotion of union values has to occur through struggle and not be diverted into attempts to change the Labor Party.
To that end four major rallies have been held in the last month in an unprecedented show of unity by public sector unions.
Midday rallies have attracted as many as five thousand workers and community activists as nurses, correctional service officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, teachers and public servants have joined forces to demand the withdrawal of attacks on their rights and conditions and upon the services that they provide to the public.
The campaign has taken on national importance as groups like the ACTU come on board, incensed at the sight of a state Labor government using legislation to over-ride collectively negotiated Agreements and Awards to reduce and remove Long Service Leave and recreation leave loading.
The ACTU correctly sees the SA situation as a test run for what could be an approach adopted elsewhere around the country.
Already some victories are starting to be chalked up.
Rann wanted to sell off the very popular Parks Community Centre in the working class western suburbs. Residents there have been campaigning for years to save the Parks and immediately swung into action when its closure and sale to property developers was announced in the Budget.
Rann didn’t even have the guts to announce his backdown over the issue at a press conference, but used his Twitter to announce a single sentence statement of surrender.
However, winning the battle against his attacks on bargaining rights and working conditions won’t be so easy.
Mass rallies are part of the answer, but the level of struggle needs to be lifted and taken to the stage of stoppages.
A half a dozen public sector unions could ballot their members for a joint stop work, not around the loss of specific entitlements like annual leave, but around the loss of bargaining rights under a Labor government.
That would force the government to take the unions individually into the State Industrial Relations Commission to a politically damaging voluntary conference followed perhaps by Orders that may or not be too late to stop the action.
How individual commissioners would react at a time when the SAIRC has been told to find $1.4 million in “administrative efficiencies” courtesy of the Budget might be interesting in its own right!
SA Unions executive has resolved to “continue this campaign until these demands are achieved”.
It has a choice of seeing the current momentum dissipate into a “let’s get them at the next election” dead end, or intensifying it step by step until Rann and Foley stand down, taking their Budget with them.
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